YouTube 360 videos are the closest thing to virtual reality that you can experience on your computer right now that don’t require any sort of special eye hardware. All you need is an Internet connection and the Chrome browser installed to be able to run YouTube 360 videos on your device. More →

Google can get away with being creepy in many cases because it’s just so useful. Case in point: Google this week unveiled a new search feature that will let you know whether the store or restaurant you want to visit is likely to be crowded at a given time and can even break down a place’s popularity on different days of the week. How does Google know all this about individual locations? We have no idea, but this is nonetheless an extremely useful new feature. More →

Ugh. Flash. The technology that just about everyone hates and that still just won’t die. While Flash is in its last throes out now that YouTube, Twitch and Mozilla’s Firefox browser have moved away from it, plenty of other websites still use it to deliver both video and games, among other things. Now a new movement called Occupy Flash has started up to get web users to give Flash one final big push over the cliff by uninstalling it on their computer or disabling it in their browsers. More →

When companies willfully ignore viable and increasingly dangerous threats to their business, well, it typically doesn’t end well. Especially in the fast moving world of tech, being able to pinpoint strategic threats and address them quickly is imperative.

That said, Comcast’s seeming obliviousness to growing threats from like the likes of Netflix is so confounding.

Comcast later this year is going to start a market trial of an incredibly promising new broadband technology capable of delivering maximum download speeds of 10Gbps and maximum upload speeds of 1Gbps. This news comes to us via Multichannel News’ Jeff Baumgartner and it was announced earlier on Thursday by Comcast Cable CEO Neil Smit, who said Comcast would start the trial sometime in Q4 2015. More →

Have you ever tagged a CEO or a company in a Twitter message out of sheer frustration? Maybe Delta lost your luggage or you found a glass shard in your salad at Panera Bread. Whatever the case, it can be a decent way to blow off steam, but every once in a while, the subject of the complaint will actually get the message. More →

After the farce that was Prime Day, plenty of disgruntled customers would love to find another online store to patronize rather than reward Amazon for its bait-and-switch tactics.

Of course, alternatives to a storefront as enormous as Amazon are hard to come by, but on Tuesday, CEO Marc Lore launched Jet.com, a new site that combines the shopping experience of Amazon with the pricing and membership model of a wholesale store like Sam’s Club or Costco. More →

What happens when you have the same name as a popular football star and you also own a potentially highly coveted Instagram handle? Just ask Andrés Iniesta — the regular man, not the Spanish superstar — and he’ll tell you that Instagram might freeze you out of your own account for no apparent reason. More →

During Google’s recent earnings conference call, Google chief business officer Omid Kordestani said that YouTube is now bigger than any individual US cable network when it comes to attracting 18-49 year olds, advertising’s most sought after demographic.

Despite YouTube’s apparent inability to generate much of a profit, the popular video sharing site has seen user engagement metrics skyrocket in recent months. Speaking to this, Kordestani relayed that viewers are spending more time watching YouTube videos than ever before. Year over year, the amount of time users, on average, spend watching videos is up an impressive 60%. Underscoring this tremendous growth, Kordestani added that this is the fastest growth rate in viewing time YouTube has seen in over two years.

Ever since Hulu added a premium subscription tier, users have questioned why they still have to sit through advertisements even after choosing to pay $7.99 a month. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Hulu has heard the criticism, which is why the company is exploring a brand new tier without any ads. More →

When Gabriel Weinberg, founder of the privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo, first started working on the concept for it almost a decade ago now, he didn’t set out at first to build a company around it – or even a serious product that millions of people would eventually use.

Named after the childhood game of Duck Duck Goose, the search engine that in recent days announced it’s surpassed 10 million searches a day for the first time (around 115 searches a second) actually began with Weinberg deciding he wanted a better experience for himself while using a certain Mountain View-based tech giant’s search product. More →

Oh, Comcast. Even when you do things that should be cool, you manage to make them massively disappointing. Our latest example is the pricing for the company’s new 2Gbps Internet service, which we now know will cost you $300 per month plus up to $1,000 in installation fees. A more Comcastic pricing scheme we could not imagine. More →